THE WILD PEAR TREE (AHLAT AGACI) World Cinema

Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s THE WILD PEAR TREE is an achingly beautiful portrait of an ambitious young writer returning home after college. Hoping to enjoy momentary solace in the company of nature’s calming indifference and with parents whose lives are already settled, Sinan finds only guilt in confrontations with the too-early failures of his past acquaintances and a loaded sense of responsibility toward his father’s worsening gambling addiction. This need to see his life as separate from those he left behind incites a rich and sprawling metanarrative on the self-centeredness essential to pursuing a life of creativity. At once languid and rhapsodic, THE WILD PEAR TREE is a profound and poetic look at youth misspent grasping at a maturity that, once attained, is revealed as the ultimate disappointment. – Malin Kan